Blood Brothers

Crime, Business and Politics in Asia

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Synopsis

All over Asia bankers, gangsters, government officials and intelligence agents interact while organised crime networks threaten the rest of the world.

Chinese gangs run Chinatowns all over the United States and Europe; Vietnamese mobsters have taken over the heroin trade to Australia; Russian gangsters thrive in cities througout America and the Japanese yakuza not only influence government and business at home, but chase the yen through Southeast Asia and Hawaii to Australia's Gold Coast.

Organised crime is one of the biggest and most complicated issues in the Asia-Pacific today. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are an Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures - gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, oil smuggling - are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.

Bertil Lintner knows this territory well. In Blood Brothers, he takes the reader inside the criminal fraternities of Asia and the Far East, from Russian gangsters and Japan's yakuza to Taiwan's United Bamboo Gang and the Vietnamese Triad. In examining these networks, Lintner seeks to answer the question: How are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalised mobsters?